for another. Every government is a conspiracy to enslave the laborer.
Take the morality of the capitalistic system and look at it. In the morality of the capitalistic system everything is for sale. Love, honor, liberty, everything is for sale; everything has its price, under this modern system of commercialism: profit and loss; meum et teum, and this trains every man to be a liar and a hypocrite. Men are taught to be hypocrites, to carry a mask on their face, to lie, to misrepresent everything. No man can be honest and succeed in business or make money. It is impossible. Honesty is punished with poverty, while dishonesty revels in every luxury.
Now, sir, is it fair to try a man by a class jury for disloyalty to that class? A verdict of guilty from such a source is a foregone conclusion. Do you call such a trial as that a fair, impartial, or unprejudiced trial? Nonsense. I believe if there had been some workingmen on that jury they would have understood something about this question ; they would have considered the matter quite differently. They would, at least, have given our side a fair chance.
The coal monopoly has been touched upon. Why, the capitalistic papers of Chicago say: "Strangle it." That is what Fielden said on the Haymarket. The trouble is that the moment this thing is touched you sling open the door of Socialism and in they pile pell-mell. It is no use talking. Three coal kings met in the parlor of a New York hotel—this was done last year—they advanced the price of coal, which is a free gift of nature to all her children as much as air and fire and water are; it belongs to the people alone, as Socialism maintains and will consummate, even if this court should carry out and baptize in blood an a tempt on the part of the people, peaceably and lawfully and constitutionally, to do and accomplish this result. I say these coal monopolists advanced the rate of coal fifty cents a ton, the equivalent of an advance of $30,000,000 from the needy people of the United States.
But a few days ago the same coal monopoly met again and advanced the price of anthracite fifteen cents per ton, and by limiting the output they still farther advanced the price of what remains on their hands in the market, and practically put a tax for this prime necessity of life upon the people west and east, and turned the hundred thousand miners out to freeze and starve.
Last year I was in the west. I was sent for by the Knights of Labor in Kansas on the 4th day of July, last July a year ago, to address them. While traveling that section I went throughout Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, and among the places I visited were the coal mines. I went down into the mines. I saw the manner in which this coal business was carried on. They dig up the coal out of the ground; they bring it up to a place which they call the screening. There are several kinds of coal, three kinds, the lump the nut, and the screenings. Now the screenings is the portion of the coal which falls through a certain sifter, or selve, and among it is the dust, little lumps of coal an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. This coal constitutes, the miners tell me, about one-fourth of a ton to each ton. Well, the miner receives nothing for that at all, he doesn't get a cent; it is not paid for. Last Fourth of July I witnessed these things while traveling throughout the States, and when I returned home, I was hard up. I did not have money enough to buy a ton of coal at once. I had to buy my coal by the scuttle, and I paid 10 cents a scuttle for coal that winter, and the coal that I bought was
